Would anyone like to talk about Judith Butler with me?

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I'm currently trying to get to grips with her writing. I read most of 'Gender Trouble' a while ago, in a rather hurried and sceptical mood. More recently, I've had a look at Undoing Gender. And now I'm trying to re-read Gender Trouble properly (there's an edition out with a new introduction where she explains how she's moved on a bit in response to criticisms, which is useful).

I'm really struggling, to be honest. My gut feeling is it's a bit Emperor's New Clothes, and I'm not keen - but I really want to give it some proper thought.

An example of what bugs me in a knee-jerk way is this sort of passage (from near the start of Undoing Gender):

If a decade or two ago, gender discrimination applied tacitly to women, that no longer serves as the exclusive framework for understanding its contemporary usage. Discrimination against women continues – especially poor women and women of color, if we consider the differential levels of poverty and literacy not only in the United States, but globally – so this dimension of gender discrimination remains crucial to acknowledge. But gender now also means gender identity, a particularly salient issue in the politics and theory of transgenderism and transsexuality.

I just can't help feeling this is an incredibly, even insultingly, privileged point of view? I mean, of course gender discrimination continues! She says it as if it's just in its dying gasp, but isn't it a huge issue?

Would anyone like to help me understand as I read?

Btw, I will totally understand if this thread dies a death, so don't worry!

Not to mention those bodies that are too young, old, sick, etc, to meet the criteria.

I'm having a problem seeing your post of 21.10 Ezinma - it's first line shows up on Threads I'm On but it just isn.t visible when I click on the thread? Are you able to copy and paste it?

I am still reading and thinking about everything. I am trying to read through your post, almond, and think carefully about it. And I really appreciate the clarity of your writing beachcomber, I do not feel able to inhabit such an unequivocal position on this. I'm still thinking about your Foucault question. I have the sort of mind which picks up concepts and frames of reference for use or to think through other concepts, it's my thinking style. I'm just trying to think carefully about how Foucualt might be useful outwith that kind of thinking style. My clearest sense is that Foucault makes direct the effects of ideology on the body. He takes up the idea that subjects are interpellated and materializes that effect on the body of the individual. This is really important to my feminism because it describes way in which ideology becomes a fact of embodiment, thereby feeling natural or real whereas I think you could read traditional leftist ideology critique and imagine that all people would have to do to be liberated from false ideology is think more correctly. I also personally am particularly interested in the embodiment of ideology in the way that it regulates agency - in the way that women are.socialised as weaker.and literally grow up to embody this, for.example - and the way that this has profound effects on the individual's sense of themselves as a way of cultivating or curtailing agency. Foucualt has been key to my thinking in this, really. But more generally, I always always think that stuff which has resonance for.me is useful even when it is not directly engaged with feminism, which is sometimes a really helpful position and sometimes it may just be an act of projecting consensus into all the stuff I feel I respond to, on the basis that I respond to it.

Right, I've just seen that post, ezinma, for some reason it didn't show on my tablet but has on my computer.

I think that the way that Butler is loosening, for want of a better word, the stability of bio sex when she describes it as "discontinuous" is not to deny the need for a collective consciousness amongst women as a political group but rather is underscoring the way in which the gender performance that is expected of us, and the regulatory practices that maintain it have no ethical, rational or natural basis on which you could argue for them. Which makes gender an especially violent distribution of power.

Ezinma, biological sex exists as a material reality in the same way that ageing does. The categories of juvenile and adult exist as a binary based on body parts, and many individuals do not fit into the binary. They are then put into social categories with legal consequences. But you seem happy to talk about young and old as if such categories are real.

As for why somebody should be connected to a physical state they are not currently in, one reason would be that discrimination is cumulative over a lifetime. Chances of dying in childbirth are increased by denying seven year old girls education. Chances of disability among elderly women are increased by poor health care during pregnancy while younger. We improve lives by looking at events across the whole life cycle and at the links between generations of women, not at an individual in one moment. People's futures and pasts matter to who they are and what happens to them.

Ezinma, I also think most of your post isn't related to your question.

The question - can I be sure bio sex is a thing. Yes, it exists as a material reality. We see that through events that materially happen - that is that they happen in conjunction with social relationships not just as a consequence of them - menstruation for example.

The consequences for people who don't fit into neat boxes is a product of how we socially construct out perspective on bio sex

Sorry, but juvenile and adult do not exist in a binary system based on body parts analogous to the binary of male and female. We recognise that legal categories for adult and juvenile are arbitrary decisions made in order to boundary what are actually quite fuzzy borders concerning things like the capacity of the individual to take legal responsibility for the consequence of actions, to be able to make sensible decisions about property and wealth. Moreover, they are categories which one would would normally expect to pass through as an individual during one's lifetime. Neither of those things apply to biological sex. And ageing may happen to everyone, and in that sense is a material reality, but being female doesn't happen to everyone, nor does having babies happen to every female, or menstruation etc. etc.

In one way of looking at it biological sex really is a specific and particular problem and its apparently binary nature is responsible for those discriminations you describe. If we weren't working with an idea that these facts defined those groups of people - never mind the violence that that does to those who don't fit those categories in those ways - we wouldn't be ordering social systems that excluded and marginalised the experiences of women because we'd be building social systems which assumed that people needed education to prevent maternal deaths; that people would need time out of their working lives to bring up young; that people may get pregnant and need further nutritional and health support, etc etc. I'm trying to say that we'd organise social systems based on a single subject position, and assumed that all subjects may or may not get pregnant (etc. etc.) If we built social systems which didn't busy themselves with identifying who it was that was likely to do this and instead assumed that all subjects had a range of potentialities which we agreed should not disadvantage us socially then we might be thinking like Judith Butler.

I'm not trying to disappear the category of women and I believe in class analysis. I'm just trying to think through why it might be useful to work outside of binary sex categories in social and legal systems.

That isn't true.

Age in biology is not arbitrary. You either have an adult humerus (one where the three parts are fused) or you have a juvenile humerus; the same for many other bones. You have either developed a complete set of adult dentition or you have not and have juvenile dentition. From putting these factors together there are two categories for the whole body which are mutually exclusive. You are either an adult or a juvenile.

But some people no longer have teeth, or never had arms, or have a medical condition which disrupts part of their development. They don't 'fit.'

And in conjunction with that we socially construct, with some loose connection to the biological process of age, whether somebody is socially and legally considered juvenile or adult.

It is very similar to sex and gender.

The problem with all of these arguments with biological sex not existing is that they are all based on claiming some other materially real process does. And all the other processes or categories are just as prone to construction, young, old, impaired, pregnancy, nutrition, physical strength.

There can be no category as prone to construction and as contested as nutrition. Food taboos, what food even is, what food means, what is nutritional, what is and is acceptable processing, what 'food' makes you sick or well, what is ceremonial etc.

If we are going to object to the concept of biological sex, don't we have to hold all the things that are in the same category of materially real to the same standard? I don't see how we can object to biological sex on the basis of the supposed reality and neutrality of other things which have all the same issues.

I don't see anyone arguing for the neutrality of the others, more like the neutrality of the others points to a way that biological sec could.be as ideologically neutral and as.unconnected to overall social outcomes.as the.relative fusedness of.your humerus. And the fact remains that aging is a process we all experience and being an adult implies one has been a juvenile, whereas sex in no way functions.like that for us.

Outself, it would be impossible to work out what kind of system would disadvantage people who got pregnant without looking at whether outcomes were worse or better for the people who got pregnant. To do that, you would have to make a distinction between the two groups to see if one had worse outcomes.

The same is true for every other kind of variation. You can't work out if something is disadvantaging tall people, asthmatic people, people who live inland unless you make a distinction between the groups.

Not everybody becomes an adult though. It isn't something where everyone passes through all stages. I don't think fusing of bones is neutral. For men, broadness of shoulders is very important (at least in the UK and US) to masculinity. Broadness of shoulders is related to age at which the clavicle fuses, which is highly variable. An older, more experienced twenty one year old can be perceived poorly socially based on what is simply a later fusing clavicle compared to another male who is eighteen but fused earlier.

I think the idea that we are capable of perceiving any kind of phenomena in an ideologically neutral way is contrary to what post modernism was even saying.

It goes back to Buffy's comments on people employing post modernism to actually promote modernism - arguing that there is some kind of correct, natural, neutral way of apprehending things and it is everyone else is being ideological.

I think it is actually more like romanticism - that there are some things we just underneath it all just know. Something that can be comprehended as real, people would just breast feed, eat, reproduce etc if we peeled away all this social construction. But we don't just know things. It is always bound up in a belief system of one sort or another.

Well, I'm reading all this with interest but I'm still not clear on what Butler or Foucault have brought to the table to help women as a class free themselves from patriarchal society. I mean something that women in general or feminist theorists hadn't already worked out and described in much more accessible ways.

I think I get frustrated with this type of philosophy because it feels like a whole lot of musing and beating around the bush about things that are actually quite straightforward. The main thing that I can remember about my limited reading of Foucault is stuff about power being pervasive/insidious/not reliant on presence and or force. I get it but I feel like it is something that women have been saying and have known for a long time. As have Marxists when they analyse cultural hegemony. It's the concept of the status quo, it's exactly what feminists mean when they use the term patriarchy.

Thank you OutSelf for saying that you appreciate the clarity of my writing. Clarity really matters to me, which is possibly much of the reason why I don't get on with Butler and prefer the labrys like writings of Daly and Dworkin and the astounding logic of MacKinnon.

As a total aside, for those of you who know more about Foucault than I do, what do you make of him being a BDSMer? I know that for me as someone who supports radical feminist analysis, it means that I don't entirely trust him (I mean with regards to feminism).

I'm using neutral because you said it and not because I believe in neutrality. Yes, everything we know of happens inside of social systems. But you can't seriously be arguing that having broad shoulders for.men is socially important so everything has an equality of ideological value. Sex is singled out as specifically and.unavoidably meaningful whereas the sum of my life chances can not be represented through the broadband of my shoulders man or not.

When you say it would be impossible to work out whether being pregnant socially disadvantaged people.or not without looking at those people as a class I totally agree. Pregnant people's experience should not necessitate entirely social systems which disadvantage others who may become pregnant. Pregnancy should not be socially disadvantaged and it is not crazy to suggest that it wouldn't be if it were not associated purely with women the social class. If we just assumed that pregnancy was a.potential of all subjects under the law, and did not go on to categorise those subjects on the basis of their perceived biological.potential for.becoming pregnant, then we would still have women becoming pregnant but that fact wouldn't be use to extrapolate a system of discrimination based on that potential. Which all bio female..do not have and do not exercise in the first place.

Beachcomber, I think a distinction can be made between the reproductive class and women, if we're looking at Marxism. If some males are placed in a category where they are expected to take on a life long burden of sexual or reproductive work that other men do not have to, then I would consider them part of the reproductive class. There do seem to be historical examples of that, and it is argued for certain cultures now, India for example.

I think there should be a distinction between a sex role (attributed to people on the basis of their perceived biological sex) and gender roles (which includes sex roles but also includes roles given to people perceived to be the same sex but considered to have different genders). I'm not suggesting it for some kind of society we could or should live in, but for understanding societies as they operate now.

OutsSelf, I may be misunderstanding you, but you seem to be arguing that pregnancy socially disadvantages people because it is associated with the sex class women, and only because of that.

And then you are saying, there was no such thing as women (in social understanding), then we would then just have the idea that anyone can become pregnant and no system of discrimination would exist.

You are then saying that perceiving females as people who may become pregnant is unfair on the females who either don't want to become pregnant or can't.

If that is not what you are saying, then I'm sorry for misunderstanding you.

I don't think any of that would work for the reason I have already given of having to make a distinction between people to see who is experiencing the discrimination. Not all discrimination is deliberate. It can come into being by simply not recognising that a group exists and that it has different needs.

If we were to decide what kind of society would best meet the needs of people who can get pregnant, then the people best able to answer that question are the people it actually happens to, and they will be explain it through a series of life events before, during or after pregnancy.

And one of the major elements of that would be recognising that there a different group of people who have the capacity to impregnate without medical intervention, and those people carry a specific risk of being able to impregnate people, and females should have a right to know who is likely to carry that risk. It is not helpful to make out that any person may impregnate somebody and we should all walk around behaving as if all contact with all people carries that risk and should act accordingly. It is a basic thing people need to know - sex education. To try and set up a system at a higher level where we don't recognise this, when on a lower interpersonal level everyone will still have to recognise this to make reproductive choices is unworkable.

As for the unfairness to females who don't get pregnant, I said this was the crux of the whole issue on one of the first transgenderism threads.

For the first time in history, we have a situation where large numbers of women (mostly white, well educated, relatively wealthy and living in MEDCs) have chosen not to become pregnant, or to delay pregnancy until their thirties. Many of these women are now arguing that women being a reproductive class should not be the focus of feminism.

Which makes sense for them, because they are not part of the reproductive class to the extent that most other women are, and to defend their own interests (I shouldn't be lumped in with these breeders etc) they can make themselves the women who are most oppressed, or at least marginalise mothers.

While at the same time, African American women are three times more likely to die as a consequence of childbirth than white American women, and taking Africa as a whole (which is how the stats put it, rather than how I'd like to break it down) one in sixteen of all women in Africa will die as a direct consequence of childbirth or pregnancy. And many females globally become pregnant before they even become women (an adult human female).

So the whole idea that we should make the unfairness of talking about women as if it is not mainly about people who may become pregnant is hugely ideological within the context we are in. And I don't see a point in talking about gender and sex in any other context than the one we live in, and being aware of who stands to benefit from arguing for one supposedly neutral set of statements over another.

As for broad shoulders and bio sex, they are not comparable. Shoulders and clavicle fusing are one aspect of adulthood. The whole of what makes someone an adult is comparable to the whole of sex. It is a huge area of human rights. I don't think the fact you may get to be an adult and become the more powerful group makes it less of an issue combining a material reality and a social construct, although its temporary nature makes the consequences different. It doesn't make defining it as materially real more or less important than it is for sex.

I agree that pregnancy disadvantages people. I agree that those disadvantages need to be tackled by looking at the experience.and.outcomes.of.those who experience.it. Those experiences and outcomes need not need to define,.delimited or.otherwise describe the condition of being women though; and that description need.not mobilise.social.structures which disadvantage me as such

Aging as a process which happens to all bodies and being sexed as female.or.male are not analogous. In the way that each body bears the same potential to age, but not the Sam potential to be sexed as female. Sexing is a lifelong designation which is spectacularly meaningful in a way not comparable to any other biological quality, save race and race is largely discredited as an actual ground for difference and instead largely accepted as a socially constructed system of privelege. I don't know how else to be clear about this. Aging and being sexed are not the same biologically in that once designated female I do not then routinely go on to develop maleness; and they are not the same socially because of well, patriarchy.

No part of what I am saying implies we would start pretending that we weren't sure about whether I had the capacity to be pregnant or make someone pregnant. Just that impersonating or being pregnant wouldn't be deployed as signifiers of social class based on a discontinuous and imprecise biological binary that failed to describe the massive and differing realities of how people experience and exercise their biological potential.

I'm not saying that discrimination against females.on the basis of their reproductive capacity is unfair if they don't exercise it. I'm saying that it is unfair to disadvantage people who become pregnant and enshrine that disadvantage as an inevitability of sex.

What other definition should the category of woman be based on?

I am coming more and more to the conclusion that I am not a feminist. Iam concerned with the oppression of the reproductive class. I don't see any reason to support the attempts of women who want to not be part of it and then claim to be oppressed by the the acknowledgement that the class exists (not saying you are doing that).

Women aren't oppressed by having to do reproductive work (including pregnancy and breast feeding). They are oppressed because it isn't viewed as work and men don't do their share(caring for the elderly for example).

Rather than imagining a society where we anticipate that anyone could become pregnant, I would rather imagine one where everyone must do reproductive work, but only some do it through pregnancy. If everyone has to do reproductive work, there no longer is a reproductive class.

I'd rather stop the conversation if it's making you think you aren't a feminist. FWIW most feminists I know are anti Butler (as I have recently discovered). But your question about what should we base the category of woman on is rather her point, isn't it? That the category of woman has been used as a rationale for the ways that social systems unfairly disadvantage those who do specific kinds of labour. And that falling within that category delimited ones outcomes and social.potential despite the discontinuities between individuals.within that class. Anyway, I'm not even sure to what extent I am in agreement with any of this, I'm just trying to respond to your points in the context of.a.discussion of.Butler.

I just really feel I need to make clear, that personally speaking it's absolutely not that I want not to be part of the reproductive class - in fact I have two children and ideally would like one more bc plus adopt some - it's that I think we should all be responsible.for.reproduction. I don't want people who birth children to be disempowered socially or disadvantaged economically because of their pregnancy. I thought this before I had them, too.

What I would say, in response to your concern about women who want not to have the focus of feminism be on reproductive status is it might be kinder (to yourself as you sound a bit glum, apologies if.you aren't) to think that while reproductive status is.clearly historically and contemporaryly meaningful in the production of our gender.politics, the social structures that it has produced are.perhaps.more complex now and in some ways have been abstracted from that basis to the degree that if you removed the reproductive bias then you'd still be left with vast pockets of.inequity. I'm sure that the issue.of.male violence, for example, would not be solved if men picked up their part of the reproductive labour. Male violence has become a.sort of project of its own really, hasn't it?

Sorry if what I have written has caused you to doubt the feminist project. I'm pretty sure that to that extent I have miscommunicated and misrepresented the way of thinking that we are trying to discuss.

It isn't your posts in particular that make me feel I cannot identify as a feminist. It is the huge popularity and repetition of the same and similar ideas by self identified feminists, and their use of these ideas to close down discussion of many of the greatest global women's rights issues. One individual repeating these ideas, either to support or challenge them does so within that context.

I also don't think Butler is responsible for the spread of that perspective in her books, as she is saying something more specific than the way those ideas are being used. What I do blame her for is not coming back and very clearly stating that she does not agree with certain arguments. In the video linked to on this thread, the woman she is in conversation with talks about the social model of disability, making a clear nature/culture distinction between impairment/disability. That model has been criticised by others in exactly the way Butler criticises sex/gender. But Butler does not hold impairment to the same standards that she holds bio sex, despite the consequences for women.

To come back to the point of can I be sure that bio sex is a thing. All that requires is that I know of the existence of one person (if we are applying it to humans) who has a reproductive organ. To know that biological sexes exist, all that requires is the existence of at least two people who have reproductive organs that have different functions to each other.

All further points about is it constant over your life time, how many more sexes, how many differences do you need, etc are interrogations of what we know about the materiality of bio sex. But they aren't arguments against bio sex existing, just about differences in opinion over the form of bio sex.

Points about ways in which societies are constructed to disadvantage women are questions about gender, not about whether bio sex exists.

The basic question of whether bio sex exists should be held to the same standard of evidence as all other examples of material phenomena.

The idea that ageing does not require the same standard of evidence because young people become old but females do not become males is one I do not see the logic of. We don't deny the existence of Down's syndrome but
accept the existence of wet macular degeneration on the basis that you either always have Down's syndrome or you don't, while wet macular degeneration is something some people grow into having.

Something is materially real if language structures how we apprehend something but does not constitute it. Pregnancy is apprehended through language but language doesn't constitute it. Being able to produce sperm is apprehended through language but language doesn't constitute it.

If you are asking for greater evidence for those things than you are for impairments, ageing, nutrition, physical strength, violence etc, you are holding bio sex to a different standard than anything else. The reason for doing so isn't just to make it easier to deny that women exist as a class, but because if you deny the existence of all material things, you are trapped in a circular argument. X is a social construct based on Y, a social construct based on Z, which is based on A and so on. And why should anyone care? If none of them can be shown to be based in the materially real, why does any of it matter. Being punched in the face by a man until the woman dies- well, violence, faces, death and women and punching are all just social constructs anyway, so why should anyone care?

The point I am making about biological sex vs aging are in response to your assertion: biological sex exists as a material reality in the same way that ageing does. I am not asking for a higher standard of evidence for biological sex, I am saying that it does not function in the same way as a material reality or lived process or social class as aging and therefore I do not accept your comparison because it simplifies those processes of aging and the experience of being female as analogous where they are massively different.

I know that some people have some sorts of reproductive capacities and others have others, I don't need evidence of that. But in the way that biological sex is used to mean a prediscursive binary into which we all fall and that category is then used to organise, ground and rationalise gender based oppression, we might wonder why it is that we absolutely insist on classing people according to their gender where the basis of it, biological sex, is not fixed, given, continuous or materially defining except socially. And if we accept that biological sex is the constituent of the prediscursive we risk losing the means to speak about how it has come to ground, on a false basis, a regulatory and oppressive system of gender. The falseness is not to say it does not exist, but to say that it is a regulatory ideal more than it is an accurate description of my material experience at any given time except in the context of the social.

I would like to say, I am not interested in disappearing women from the conversation, I am not interested in saying that the constitutive experiences of being female in our world is not meaningful, I am not trying to say what about the menz, I do not think it is sexist to focus my liberationary efforts on women. I do not recognise that as a description of my feminism and I do not recognise those agendas as feminist.

I am not saying biological sex does not exist in terms of it materially constituting some sorts of experience and therefore precluding others (i.e. I would not expect to become pregnant and produce sperm; one forecloses the other). I am saying that biological sex as we describe it is describing material experiences from the position of a regulatory framework; but in that process the regulatory framework is assumed to be the thing it describes and regulates; and therefore the regulatory framework produces, rather than arises from, the specific description material experience of sex in an individual ; because it selects, regulates and orders what and how I choose to describe my experience of sex. .